Say my name

My car has a feature in which I can ask it to play songs from a particular artist by voice. It works okay most of the time, though it's certainly still not as accurate as often as I'd like. Still, it's much safer for me to issue the voice command than to try to type out the artist name while driving. 

The other day I tried to cue up the latest album by Chvrches (so far I'm enjoying their synth pop sound). But because they use a v where the u is, I couldn't figure out how to pronounce their name. I tried saying "churches" but that only brought up dozens of results with the word "churches" in the name.  

Back when Jeff Bezos was trying to think of what to call this little online bookselling company he was going to start, he wanted a name that started with A because back then search engines alphabetized their results so having a name that began with A would put the company URL closer to the top of the page. 

I suspect more and more of our interaction with computers will be using voice, and thus the next generation naming hack that means the most for maximum discoverability may be having a name that can easily be pronounced and is unambiguously unique if you hear it phonetically. Worth considering before you choose some bizarre company name just because it's the shortest URL you can find that hasn't been snapped up already. 

The kicker is that Chvrches is pronounced exactly like "churches".  

How to watch Star Wars

I missed this when it first came out, but Machete Order is an impassioned argument for the proper order to watch the Star Wars movies.

Now I’d like to modify this into what I’ve named Machete Order on the off chance that this catches on because I’m a vain asshole.

Next time you want to introduce someone to Star Wars for the first time, watch the films with them in this order: IV, V, II, III, VI

Notice something? Yeah, Episode I is gone.

Episodes II and III aren’t exactly Shakespeare, but standing next to the complete and utter trainwreck that is Episode I, they sure look like it. At least, III does anyway.

I have not watched Episode 1 in a long time, it was indeed a dull piece of cinematic drama.

Still, I found it not just tedious but curious. At its core was a detailed examination of economics, of the power dynamics of insterstellar trade and politics, and thus it seemed miscast amidst the other Star Wars movies which centered more around two hero's journeys, one of the father, one of the son.

Why some words sound fat or skinny

In many languages, front vowels are used in words for small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words for big, fat, heavy things. It’s not always true, but it’s a tendency that you can see in the stressed vowels in words like little, teeny or itsy-bitsy (all front vowels) versus humongous or gargantuan (back vowels). Or in Spanish, chico (“small,” front vowel) versus gordo (“fat,” back vowel). Or French petit (front vowel) versus grand (back).

One marketing study at Loyola College created pairs of made-up product names that were identical except for having front or back vowels and asked participants to answer:

Which brand of laptop seems bigger, Detal or Dutal?

Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?

Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen?

In each case, the product named with back vowels (Dutal, Kuffi, Nullen) was chosen as the larger, heavier, thicker product.

Full story here, including why we tend to speak in high pitches to babies and some evidence that this is taken into account by companies naming ice cream flavors and crackers.

Freudian sext, err, slip

The pleasure of sexting lies precisely in its irreality, its origin and end in fantasy.  It’s not a pleasure that imitates “actual” sexuality, but a pleasure that ignores the constraints and conditions to which “actual” sexual activity is subjected, in every sense.  For one thing, sexting is a form of pleasure that transcends the spatial limitations of physical sex:  It’s hard to have sex with someone in another country, but it’s pretty easy to send them a picture of your penis.  It’s an activity in which desire orients action without the physical and ethical constraints of mutual presence.  It’s a pleasure oriented fundamentally toward the self – and like all auto-erotism, it’s most fundamentally a form of narcissism.  The pleasure of virtual sexuality isn’t about other people; it’s about the ideal sexual self that you can imagine for yourself if you don’t have to stop and account for all the ways in which you aren’t what you want to be.  Laplanche and Pontalis put it well:  “The ideal, one might say, of auto-erotism is ‘lips that kiss themselves.’  Here, in this apparently self-centered enjoyment, as in the deepest fantasy, in this discourse no longer addressed to anyone, all distinction between subject and object has been lost.”

This might be the longest article written about sexting that didn't crack a joke.  Perhaps in reading it we can all find some sympathy for Carlos Danger.

Visual signaling

Tsay took the actual audition recordings of the top 3 finalists from 10 prestigious international classical music competitions and asked a group of participants to select the winners. One group watched a video audition, the second group listened to an audio recording of the same audition, and a final group watched the video audition with the sound turned off. 

As her study participants were untrained in classical music, Tsay expected them to do no better at choosing a winner than random chance. This proved true for the first two groups, who chose the winner less than 33% of the time. But to everyone’s surprise, the amateurs did significantly better than chance when watching only a silent video. 

Tsay then replicated the experiment with professional musicians and found the same results. Despite their expertise, the musicians also did no better than chance at picking the winner based on audio or video recordings. But when they watched a silent video recording, they too performed dramatically better. 

Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information just as amateurs do.

It's the mythical story about the Kennedy vs Nixon debate results but for classical musicians. Maybe that's why Jascha Heifetz played everything so quickly; his body language was so muted that if he'd played more slowly some might have failed to pick up on his virtuosity.

Whether the Kennedy vs Nixon narrative was a myth or not, I'm not so sure it meant that Nixon wasn't judged fairly by those who watched on TV. Much of being the POTUS is projecting a body language that inspires confidence and respect, so the fact that those watching on TV might have been scoring the candidates on that vector seems fair.